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The new law, according to the QNA release, will ban any dissemination via electronic means of “incorrect news” that endangers “the safety of the state, or public order or internal or external security.” The law also “stipulates punishment for anyone who exceeds any principles of social values.” The cybercrime legislation would also make illegal the publishing of “news or pictures or audio-video recordings related to the sanctity of the private and family life of individuals, even if they are correct, via libel or slander through the Internet or an IT device.”

Observers are worried because tightened cybercrime legislation in the United Arab Emirates has been used to prosecute dissenting speech seen on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube

Jan Keulen, the former director of the Doha Centre for Media Freedom, said that enacting the law could “impede the development of online journalism.” Keulen told Al-Monitor that Qatar’s new leader, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani — who took over for his father last July — has never mentioned topics such as democracy, elections or press freedom. Meanwhile, Qatar’s news powerhouse Al Jazeera touts these principles throughout the region.

Its slogan was "the voice of the voiceless", but after four decades the prestigious Lebanese daily As-Safir is in danger of falling silent, illustrating the unprecedented crisis rocking the country's media.Lebanese newspapers, long seen as a beacon of freedom in a tumultuous region, are suffering because of the country's political paralysis and a slump in funding from rival regional powers.

As-Safir's main competitor, An-Nahar, is also struggling to survive and its employees have not been paid for months."Our ink has run dry," said Talal Salman, founder and editor-in-chief of As-Safir. "The Lebanese press, a pioneer in the Arab world, is undergoing its worst crisis ever."

He blames the country's political stalemate, with existing divisions exacerbated by the war in neighbouring Syria.Two main blocs dominate Lebanon: one backed by the West and Gulf kingdoms, and the other by Iran and Syria.The rift means there have been no parliamentary elections since 2009, and lawmakers have failed for nearly two years to elect a president."Without politics, there is no media, and there is no politics in Lebanon today,"

Rajab, a former journalist, was appointed last month to lead the new Ministry of Information Affairs. The government department was created to help implement the media reforms suggested by the Bahrain Independent Commission (BIC)

the report noted the role government-allied outlets played in contributing to tensions. The commission found that much of the coverage in February and March from television, radio and print media “contained derogatory language and inflammatory coverage of events.” The Bahrain government controls all of the radio and television stations in Bahrain. Moreover, six of the seven newspapers in the country take pro-government positions. The BIC also reported that journalists working for news outlets said they were coerced into covering events from a pro-government perspective instead of objective reporting.

The commission’s recommendations included suggestions that the state television and radio become more neutral and provide access to citizens with a variety of opinions. The report also recommends the relaxation of censorship in all the country’s media. Not giving opposition groups enough space to speak openly further polarises the atmosphere

Ben Ali’s regime deployed the surveillance gear to demonstrate its power, Wagner says. Changing e-mails into nonsense, rather than luring dissidents into ambushes, created a pervasive unease, in which even spam could be perceived as the work of Ammar 404, he says.

“It leaves citizens in a persistent state of uncertainty about the security and integrity of their communications,” he says. Western suppliers used the country as a testing ground. Moez Chakchouk, the post-revolution head of the Tunisian Internet Agency, says he’s discovered that the monitoring industry gave discounts to the government-controlled agency, known by its French acronym ATI, to gain access. In interviews following Ben Ali’s ouster after 23 years in power, technicians, activists, executives and government officials described how they grappled with, and in some cases helped build, the repressive Wonderland.

Saadaoui, who has a master’s degree in computer science from Michigan State University, says he helped procure and set up the system that captured and changed e-mails. It uses a technique called deep-packet inspection, which peers into the content of communications and sends suspect e-mails to the Interior Ministry. During an hour-long interview in his office at the National Telecommunications Agency, he describes a monitoring room with metal bars on the windows and 20 desks, where staffers review the e-mails in an array of languages. “They were able to read why it was blocked and decided whether it should be re-routed to the network or deleted,” he says. “Or changed.”

the BBC updated their pages. With some rather diplomatic language . Israel: “Seat of government Jerusalem, though most foreign embassies are in Tel Aviv.” . http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/2012/countries/israel . Palestine: “Intended seat of government East Jerusalem. Ramallah serves as administrative capital.” . http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/2012/countries/palestine

“What’s happening is very serious,” said Hani Shukrallah, the editor of Ahram Online, an English-language site. “We’ve got an organization that is not interested in democratizing the press, or freeing the press,” he said, referring to the Brotherhood. “It’s interested in taking it over.”

He not only preserved the ministry that regulates the media — for many the embodiment of the autocratic state — but also installed a Brotherhood member as its head.

“The legal description of publishing crimes is too broad, and the law of publishing needs revision,”

Since 2003, the televised media environment in Iraq has witnessed dramatic changes. Whereas Iraqis were once forced to choose between only two local television stations — one administered by the Ministry of Information and the other run by the son of then-President Saddam Hussein — they now have dozens of satellite channels reporting on national affairs.

a deep hunger on the part of many Iraqis to learn about the outside world from which they had been cut off by the old regime's extremely strict official censorship. Iraq undertook a rapid and astounding transition from a model of censorship resembling what George Orwell described in his novel 1984 toward what former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld described as a state of "untidy” freedom.

There is a widespread belief that the official Iraqi channel has lost its independence and been completely reduced to subservience to the will and dictates of the government, even to the point that members of parliament have threatened to block funding for its operating budget. In similar fashion, most other Iraqi channels have become captive to political influences either hostile or sympathetic toward the government. Many have concluded that the media outlets in Iraq are actually deepening the country's ethnic and sectarian divides, rather than working to overcome them. 

An Arabic net address ending has become the first to go live as part of the rollout of more than 1,000 new generic top-level domain (gTLD) name suffixes. The first websites ending in شبكة. - pronounced dot shabaka, and meaning web - went online a day ahead of schedule.

The DotShabaka Registry - the Dubai-based business running the شبكة. gTLD - announced that both its own homepage and that of the United Arab Emirates telecoms provider Etisalat had started using its new suffix, at a conference in Dubai.

"It's monumental, in my opinion, because it means the internet finally speaks in Arabic," Yasmin Omer, general manager of the DotShabaka Registry told the BBC.

BFEA and MEMRI will be working together to improve perceptions of Bahrain

It is unclear whether BFEA is aware of MEMRI's Israeli connection. Albawaba describes MEMRI as an "independent, non-partisan research institute" – which it is not.

MEMRI was set up in 1998 by Yigal Carmon, a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence, and Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli-born American, ostensibly to "bridge the language gap between the Middle East and the West". An early version of its website also said it aimed to emphasise "the continuing relevance of Zionism to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel" but this was later deleted (though preserved in an internet archive).

it was not the opposition of "fundamentalists" that kept rai music (not just Khaled's) off of Algerian state radio. It was rather the Algerian (secular) regime's cultural policies. The state promoted classical Arabic culture and language and denied Algeria's multi-cultural nature. Expressive culture in Arabic dialect or Berber was therefore mostly excluded from the state-controlled media. Rai is sung in the distinctive colloquial Arabic of Wahran, which is not only very different from "classical" or literary Arabic but is also full of borrowings from Spanish, French and Berber. This official national-cultural politics, which was particularly severe during the regime of Houari Boumediene (1965-1978), began to loosen during Chadly Benjadid's regime (1979-1992). In his 1998 autobiography, "Derrière la sourire," Khaled recounts how he managed to break the official embargo in the early 1980s. He was invited to appear on a television show in Algiers, which he knew couldn't be censored because it was to be broadcast live. Khaled was warned ahead of time: no vulgarities, no sex. So he sang three songs: the first, about the Prophet Muhammad; the second, a "poetic" song, one that was artistically acceptable; and the third, about alcohol and women.

Khaled, and other rai stars, came to play at this festival due to the efforts of the "liberal" wing of the Algerian regime -- and particularly to Lieutenant-Colonel Hosni Snoussi, director of the state-supported arts and culture organization, Office Riadh el Feth in Algiers, who had taken Cheb Khaled under his wing. The regime's liberal wing became interested in promoting rai in the wake of a spate of unrest that erupted during the early 1980s. Most notably, the 1980 riots in Tizi Ouzou, Kabylia (the "Berber Spring"); the 1985 riots in Algiers, which broke out following rumors that housing being built for the poor would be allocated to state bureaucrats; and the 1986 student riots in Constantine that resulted in the deaths of four protesters and spread to other cities. Young Algerians played a leading role in all these protests. The liberal wing of the regime determined that, to deter further unrest, the state should focus on promoting the interests of youth and on developing the market economy. Rai was very popular with Algerian youth, and so the "liberals" determined that promoting it was to be an important element of these reform efforts. It was changes in state policy toward rai, pushed by Snoussi, that got Khaled and other rai stars onto the stage in Algiers in 1985.

The French government had a stake in trying to control and channel the energies of the rai scene.